A German physiologist, Adolf Fick, grinds a pair of lenses to fit snugly in contact with a patient's eyeballs

The tone poem Don Juan, by the 25-year-old Richard Strauss, has a passionately mixed response at its premiere in Weimar

The new young German emperor, Wilhelm II, dismisses the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck

Henrik Ibsen publishes his play Hedda Gabler, with its powerfully manipulative central character, a year before it is first produced (in Germany)

Germany takes direct control of German East Africa as a protectorate

Britain cedes the tiny island of Heligoland to Germany in return for vast areas of Africa

German aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal achieves the first of many guided flights in a glider, from a hill near Potsdam

Hansel and Gretl, an opera by German composer Engelbert Humperdinck, has its premiere in Weimar

France and Russia, alarmed by Germany's ambitions, sign a defensive Franco-Russian alliance

General Alfred von Schlieffen devises plans for a potential two-pronged attack against France and Russia in a swift war

German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen discovers rays that can penetrate light-proof barriers, and names them x-rays because their nature is as yet unknown

Otto Lilienthal dies when a wing fractures on his glider and he crashes from a height of 17 metres

Germany claims Ruanda and Urundi as a joint colony adjacent to German East Africa

Germany passes the first of four Fleet Acts, reflecting the determination of Alfred von Tirpitz to build a navy equal to that of Britain

The Bayer company in Germany sells aspirin in the form of water-soluble tablets, the first medication of its kind

Ferdinand Zeppelin's first dirigible makes its test flight from a floating hangar on the Lake of Constance

The British government assumes direct responsibility for the entire region of Nigeria, previously entrusted to a commercial company

German physicist Max Planck proposes the revolutionary concept of the quantum theory

Daimler cars launch a new brand, the Mercedes 35 hp, named after the ten-year-old daughter of the investor and distributor Emil Jellinek

Thomas Mann's first novel, Buddenbrooks, brings him immediate success

German surgeon Georg Clemens Perthes discovers, in Leipzig, that X-rays can inhibit cancer

Albert Einstein explains the photoelectric effect as a flow of discreet particles (quanta) of electromagnetic radiation

German biologists Fritz Schaudinn and Erich Hoffmann discover the micro-organism Treponema pallidum which causes syphilis

In his special theory of relativity Albert Einstein reconciles the apparent clash between relativity and electromagnetic theory

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and other Dresden students form the Expressionist group Die Brücke